Word: idealize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Addressing the first of those themes, White argues that Democratic generosity backfired. He says America overreached itself in trying to implement the national ideal of equality at the expense of the competing traditions of liberty and laissez-faire government. The second theme, the rampant inflation that topped 12 percent in 1980, he attributes to excessive federal government spending--notaby for the Vietnam War--but mostly from amateurish and inconsistent attempts to fine-tune a massive economy whose reactions could be predicted broadly at best...
...cooking it for him and the kids, survived in only 28% of American homes. The divorce rate almost doubled in the past decade, and the percentage of people living alone rose from 5.3% to 8.3%. Still, that family with the bacon is for many Americans not just the ideal family, but the American dream itself. Schlafly not only defended the home, she defended the dream, and her constituency has triumphed, for the moment, because dreams die hard...
...intellectual furtively collaborating with state power, committing sins of betrayal in police stations in the middle of the night. It is not far from another intellectual's fantasy: Norman Mailer once proposed that Eugene McCarthy, the dreamboat of the late '60s moderate left, might have made an ideal director of the FBI. McCarthy agreed. But of course, McCarthy had a sardonic genius for doubling back upon his public self and making it vanish. He did magic tricks of self-annihilation. Nixon's imaginary career - wholesome, all-American, unimpeachable -may suggest both a yearning for blamelessness (what could...
...antiself has a shadowy, ideal life of its own. It is always blessed (the antiself is the Grecian Urn of our personality) and yet it subtly matures as it runs a course parallel to our actual aging. The Hindu might think that the antiself is a premonition of the soul's next life. Perhaps. But in the last moment of this life, self and antiself may coalesce. It should be their parting duet to mutter together: "On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia." -By Lance Morrow
...dollars worth of social programs to alleviate suffering and give deprived groups a chance for betterment dramatizes the government slack of interest in making America a land of opportunity for those who most need it. The cuts and impending cuts in educational aid have turned the age-old ideal of economic betterment and class mobility into a wisp of myth...